Like a diamond

Maikani chopping nubbins using a diamond-bladed band saw.
Photo by Carsten Grupstra. 

"Find light in the beautiful sea, I choose to be happy

You and I, we're like diamonds in the sky"

- "Diamonds" by Rihanna

It was 4 pm, and I could feel the late afternoon sun on my skin. The rays shone at an angle, penetrating just below the overhead canopy of the tank room. My entire right side was bathed in yellow warmth. In front of me on the table were strips of plastic - a kitchen cutting board that we had chopped up. A bottle of super glue rested to my right. To my left. Maikani sat in front of a whirring diamond-bladed band saw. Her sunglasses held back her hair while she focused on her fingertips. Slowly, confidently, she pressed a coral "nubbin" against the blade. 

The calcium carbonate gave way to the diamond saw, and Maikani separated the top layer of living tissue from the column of limestone. She discarded the column and turned the disc of tissue sideways. Cut, turn, cut, and the nubbin was split into quarters - like equal slices of a pie. She handed two to me and two to Matthew. 

I gave my nubbin quarters a quick rinse in saltwater, then dabbed the bottoms dry. I grabbed my bottle of super glue, squeezed two drops onto the bottom of the nubbin quarter, and pressed the coral piece onto my cutting board. The procedure repeated, and then I turned to Maikani for my next nubbin allowance. 

"This looks weird," Matthew commented, staring down at his strips of cutting board. 

"You know, just some chopped-up corals super-glued to plastic," I shrugged. Then after a moment, I had to concede, "yeah, it is a bit weird."

Friends, our adventure in coral-kitchenware adhesion was all for a good cause. We're finishing an experiment that started this time last year: the nubbin transplant experiment. Some of you might remember that as a back-up to our juvenile transplant, we took little cores or "nubbins" from coral colonies and transplanted them between an inner lagoon site and a more exposed outer reef site. In November, we checked on them to assess mortality, collected samples to quantify gene expression, and used a sub-set of the survivors in a thermal tolerance assay. The results were pretty cool. 

We didn't use up all the nubbins in November, though. Some remained on the reef for a whole year. This trip, we repeated the mortality assessment, gene expression sampling, and the thermal tolerance assay. Comparing the 6-month and 1-year timepoints should show us how corals acclimate to their environment, and how long it takes for that acclimation to happen. I'm really excited to see the results!

At the end of the day, we had 144 tiny coral nubbin bits glued to our plastic strips - each one a precious diamond of a sample. They spent the night in a tank at PICRC and went into the thermal tolerance assay the next day. We should have incredible data from this experiment!